Apple watchers say Kihei has been by delayed by last-minute revisions to its mother-board - code-named C2. The rumours also claim that the iMac market will be "product starved" prior to the Kihei launch.

Kihei is expected to feature DVD, processor-speed bumps, FireWire as standard, a 3D accelerator card and SCUA (Single Common Unified Architecture). SCUA is designed for fast, powerful networking and has good digital and video handling ability. Pricing is expected to be the same as existing iMacs.

Sources also say Kihei will ship with versions of "Borg". Borg is the new core system-software that makes SCUA and the chipset compatible.

This Borg core - dubbed by developers as "OS 8.6.1 - is supplemented by features from the forthcoming Mac OS 9.0 (Sonata) and will be easily upgraded to OS 9.0.